The 18th annual KDnuggets Software Poll again got huge participation from analytics and data science community and vendors, attracting about 2,900 voters, almost exactly the same as last year. Here is the initial analysis, with more detailed results to be posted later.

Python, whose share has been growing faster than R for the last several years, has finally caught up with R, and (barely) overtook it, with 52.6% share vs 52.1% for R.

The biggest surprise is probably the phenomenal share of Deep Learning tools, now used by 32% of all respondents, while only 18% used DL in 2016 and 9% in 2015. Google Tensorflow rapidly became the leading Deep Learning platform with 20.2% share, up from only 6.8% in 2016 poll, and entered the top 10 tools.

RapidMiner remains the most popular general platform for data mining/data science, with about 33% share, almost exactly the same as in 2016.

We note that many vendors have encouraged their users to vote, but all vendors had equal chances, so this does not violate KDnuggets guidelines. We have not seen any bot voting or direct links to vote for only one tool this year.

Spark grew to about 23% and kept its place in top 10 ahead of Hadoop.

Besides TensorFlow, another new tool in the top tier is Anaconda, with 22% share.

Top Analytics/Data Science Tools

Fig 1: KDnuggets Analytics/Data Science 2017 Software Poll: top tools in 2017, and their share in the 2015-6 polls